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In my last post I provided an overview of PowerPivot. I’d like to build upon the discussion in this post with a focus on Microsoft’s self-service business intelligence (BI) capabilities using Power View. You’ll see how to bring your data to life through rich visualization and interactivity.

Visualizing Our Data

Power View is the last step in our self-service BI solution exposing the tabular data model that we built in PowerPivot. It provides a visually rich, interactive reporting and data exploration experience through an incredibly simple to use interface. Through its drag and drop style of report building Power View was designed to truly bring BI to the masses. It allows anyone in an organization to quickly learn how to use the tool in order to create reports and visualize the data however they prefer in order to derive business insights. Learning from past experiences with Report Builder, Microsoft’s goal for Power View was to allow for quick and easy creation of powerful reports without overwhelming end users with too much complexity.

Data Exploration

Power View doesn’t just stop once you finish building reports. The solution provides for terrific interactive filtering, sorting, and drill down capabilities allowing you to explore and understand the data to gain insights and ultimately tell the story of this data. Sharing insights with others is as simple as saving these Power View reports to SharePoint for others to view and collaborate, or exporting Power View reports right to a PowerPoint deck for presenting the insights you’ve discovered.

Power View in Excel 2013?

That’s right, Power View will also be available in the Excel 2013 client so you now have the same rich visualization and reporting capabilities right within Excel. The only gotcha with using Power View within Excel is that you won’t be able to export Power View reports directly to a PowerPoint presentation.

With SharePoint 2013 and Excel 2013 we are also getting some new Power View visualization capabilities including support for KPI’s in reports and integration with Bing Maps for terrific geospatial visualizations.

Enough of me talking about Power View, let’s take a look at the Power View solution in the below video demonstration.